Giveaways, Technology, Smartphones, Programming and Internet

Syrian Electronic Army defaces PayPal and eBay websites in the UK, France and India

After attacking Microsoft’s social accounts and blogs relentlessly, the Syrian Electron Army have now defaced the PayPal and eBay websites in the U.K, France and India.

The defaced websites carried a binary version of the Syrian Flag, along with an anti-US message which read,

Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army!

Long live Syria!

F*** the United States Government

Anuj Nayar, PayPal’s Senior Director of Global Initiatives, got in touch with security expert Graham Cluley and said that the systems were not hacked, and the PayPal websites for the three Countries were just being redirected. Here is what he told Cluley,

We were not hacked.

For under 60 minutes, a very small subset of people visiting a few marketing web pages of PayPal France, UK and India websites were being redirected. There was no access to any consumer data whatsoever and no accounts were ever in any danger of being compromised. The situation was swiftly resolved and PayPal’s service was not affected. We take the security and privacy of our customers very seriously and are conducting a forensic investigation into this situation.

The hackers confirmed this on Twitter in a tweet which said,

“Rest assured, this was purely a hacktivist operation, no user accounts or data were touched,”

They also tweeted the reason behind the defacement,

For denying Syrian citizens the ability to purchase online products, PayPal was hacked by SEA

And also informed the same to PayPal users in another tweet,

If your PayPal account is down for a few minutes, think about Syrians who were denied online payments for more than 3 years. #SEA

The affected websites were quickly restored and are working fine now.

Now if you are wondering why I haven’t embedded the tweets in this article, its because the Twitter handle of the Syrian Electronic Army, “Official_SEA16” has been suspended by Twitter.